“I set a high bar for new Canon lenses. I expect them to be excellent and generally their recent releases have been. Since this was a wide-angle zoom, though, my expectations were lowered a bit. Canon has always struggled with wide-angle zooms. The 17-40 is a good, not great lens. The 16-35 f/2.8 II is better than the Mk I replaced, but I’d consider it, at best, adequate considering its price.

The 16-35 f/4 IS changes that. It’s a superb optic — as good as anything else available. Of course, a lot of people want an f/2.8 zoom. But for many, like me, f/4 with IS is just fine for wide-angle shooting.”

Once they were done reviewing the EF 16-35 f/4L IS, they decided to take one apart. The LensRentals.com teardowns are a lot of fun, but also give us an idea of how durable the lens is going to be in real world use.

“Now that I’ve seen the insides I’m very optimistic that this lens will be less likely to deteriorate optically over time, and will be more easily corrected when it does. We won’t know for sure until we’ve got a year’s experience with it, of course, but from a design and assembly standpoint it looks really, really good.”